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Ryan's Game (One-offs)
The party was contracted by the Planar Cartographic Society to investigate a magical laboratory located in the Elemental Chaos. After attempting to gather some extra info around the town the party set out... Status *Location: The A-Frame *DM: Ryan *PlayersBD1: **Landon - Caeran (Eladrin Swordwizard) - Tank **Bryce - Serran (Kalashtar Cleric) - Healer **Paul - Havaul (Kalashtar turned Owlbear Sorcerer) - Striker **Raymond - Gall (Human Psion) - Controller *Date: December 30, 2011 Set-Up This session will be for level 12 characters. Roll your characters accordingly. Starting LootBD2: 85,000 gp worth of loot. You can have any gear or items you want, just as long as the total cost doesn't exceed 85,000 gp. We'll be starting in (or soon arriving at) a place where virtually any sort of item is available. Any gold you don't spend on gear or items is your personal stash. Someone in the party (or the party as a whole) should have at least 60 gp free. Setting: The party is contacted by a representative of the Planar Cartographic Society to explore a recently-discovered ruin. The Society is suffering from understaffing since the Spellplague, and they are actively recruiting. Because the PCS headquarters are located in the planar metropolis of Union, the party is invited there to receive more information and supplies. Union, an artificial demiplane, was established primarily to facilitate (and tax!) trade between different planes. While not as cosmically important or extensively connected as Sigil, Union has the advantages of being smaller, cleaner, and generally safer. The Mercanes who founded and run the city want nothing more than for people to come, stay, and spend their coin, and they go to great lengths to keep the place cleaned up. The local police force, the Union Sentinels, are highly trained, very powerful (several members are epic-level) and make a point of staying visible at all times. If it's for sale, it's for sale in Union, either legitimately or through the black market. I've got a dungeon in the works, but you can also spend some time exploring Union if you want to: it's a big place with lots to do and plenty of interesting characters to meet. Session Review Union After receiving a summons from the PCS, the party traveled to Union. The party entered the city though the Material Gate and consulted a talking kiosk about the layout of the city. They traveled around and talked to some random people about the think tank facility, but received little information. Serran convinced a hobo to rethink his life. After taking in the sights they went to the PCS headquarters to begin their mission. They got some free mundane gear(including a grappling hook) and a planar portal ritual scroll. Then they were whisked away to the facilityBD3. Magical Think Tank The team arrived in an entry office of sorts. Thick fog enveloped everyone. Some corpses and a desk greeted them. The corpses were strangely undecayed. After a bit of snooping they entered the adjacent hall. A siren went off and a decrepit golem tried to stop them, but quickly collapsedBD4. Foyer In the Foyer area of the Think Tank the party saw a dead person covered in Flux Slime-a slime that has rather nasty effects on arcane magic and arcane magic users. Three doors in the Foyer led to new areas. The left door led to the Alchemy Laboratory, the middle door led to the Quarters, and the right door led to Supernal Binding Chamber. Upon opening the door to the Supernal Binding Chamber the party encountered a Living Flaming SphereRK1. Over the course of the battle the party learned that using arcane magic on the creature caused it take on properties of the magic. Deciding to flee the party came up with a scheme to lock the Sphere in the Foyer. Supernal Binding In the Supernal Binding Chamber the party encountered an rather unhelpful succubus. They also noticed that one of the binding circles was broken. After interrogating the succubus for a bit and then discovering that the other exit in led to a missing passageway the party returned to the foyer and dodged the Flaming Sphere on their way to the Quarters. Quarters Here the party found a bunch of dead people all in the same state as those found in the arrivals area. They also found a mess hall were a demon was munching on a bit of a dead person. The party talked with him a bit. After getting a little more more background info on the facility. The party ventured forth into the Director's Office. Office Here the party encountered a dogRK2 thing--that seemed to be protecting the body of director. The party decided not to get involved. Psionics Nothing of real note. Party moved on to the storage room. Storage In the storage room the party encountered a group of NyogiRK1 slavers/scavengers. After talking a bit about the facility the party tried to part amicably but the Nyogi sprang to attack. The party fought off the Nyogi and as the Nyogi tried to flee Caeran, Gall, and a very reluctant Serran pursued them into their shipRK3. After it became obvious that this was a bad idea they opened the cargo door and jumped back into the storage room and finished of the Umber Hulks in the storage roomBD5. The party then continued on to the a room labeled "Experiments" Experiments Here the party was met by a thick fog. In this room they were attacked on sight by a SpellweaverRK1 trying to operate some strage apparatus. The battle raged on for a while over the course of which two area spells came to life and the succubus from Supernal Binding was summonedRK4. After the Spellweaver was sufficiently wounded he did something with the apparatus and fledBD6. The party fled as well and then performed the ritual to return to Union-the dog thing followed them. Wrap-up In union the party presented their report to to the PCSRK5, BD7. DM Notes The primary point of interest in Elemental Binding was an Efreet who, like the succubus, was bound there. Unlike the Succubus, he would actually abide by any agreement you made with him - including a minor wish in exchange for setting him free (or subduing him) The wish was to be one option for getting into the storage/experiment chambers. The other options were the sphinx riddle and finding a way to slog through or destroy the flux slime. I was actually anticipating that the party would either kill or befriend the young Steel Predator. In the Director's Desk (and if you didn't disable the trap you'd be attacked by a pair of living Bigby's Grasping Hands) you'd have found some journals and ledgers regarding the think tanks' projects. The most recent one can be summarized as follows (cutting out most of the more technical notes and arcane jargon): Daily journals and ledgers. New Project: 11-1-0421 Contractor: Oargrev ir’Wynarn Objectives: Research cause of Day of Mourning. Research methods of reversing effects of Day of Mourning Project Outline: Collect and analyze samples from present-day Mournland. Attempt to reverse-engineer and recreate the effects as a means of discovering a cause. Prominent features of Mournland include “Dead-Gray” Mist and abundance of Living Spells. Project Log (laced with technical Arcane jargon) 11-2: Samples gathered from Mournland. Gren, Disen and Holly killed in the process. Holly revivified: the others are beyond saving. Replacement scouts ordered. 11-5: Composition of Dead-Gray Mist resists study. Clearly not composed of water vapor. Limited exposure not immediately harmful. 11-6: Rod of Wonder found in Supernal room. Returned to storage. 11-7: Philosopher’s Stone found in Psionics room. Staff lectured on responsibility with materials. 11-8: Last night, on whim, exposed contents of Philosopher’s Stone to Dead-Gray Mist. Reaction was surprising. Skin still reeks of cinnabar. Found bag of gold outside lab today. Related? 11-10: Set up additional security to try to catch whoever’s leaving these items all over the place. Checked inventory: these are new items, not misplaced ones from storage. Memo: Never again ask Gorhe to design security. That nihilistic wild-mage insists on crazy riddles with stupid answers. Still, his obsession makes the answers predictable. 11-14: Finally found source of strange materials: a Spell Weaver is entering invisibily, leaving an item and exiting. Unusual behavior: Weavers normally take magic items, not deliver them. Dislike the ease with which the creature penetrates our defenses, but it doesn’t seem hostile. Items left behind seem in all ways normal, test negative for curses. Applied Wand of Wonder to Dead-Gray Mist. Released a lightning bolt which didn’t fade for a few minutes. Mist itself sustains Living Spell effects? (pages torn out); these were the pages grasped in the hand of the dead Weaver you found in the flux slime. 11-20: Every item the Weaver(s?) delivers leads to new breakthrough. Does it want us to succeed? What's its interest? Is it a personal fascination, or does it belong to a group? Regardless, we still have a job to do. We are almost ready to attempt synthesizing the Mist. Commentary * RK1 ** Unfortunately the interesting and more unusual aspects of this session were not a surprise to me at all. Many of the things we encountered are things that you have talked a lot about (even before this session was planned). This is more a issue of me having been around you a lot and not really an issue with the session itself. * RK2 **I did like the use of this creature to explain the lack of loot. It helped to facilitate my "willing suspension of disbelief" * RK3 **Here is where I had set aside role-play in favor of keeping the session and group on track. Gall would not have let slavers go free. At all. His personal moral code, fucked up as it is, would not allow it. * RK4 **This fight seemed to get a little bit away from you. I recall at one point you weren't sure if you had changed the defenses on one of the living spells-it bothered me a little bit to see that level of improv present (that it was there wasn't the problem... that it was displayed was). * RK5 **Overall the session was very good. You seemed more focused on the game as a DM than you do as a player, which was nice to see; you were more involved with what was going on. * BD1 ** I felt like everyone had a better grasp of their characters this time, Landon in particular seemed more at easy with that swordmage than he did with the assassin from last time. I blame the "essentials" source material that the assassin came from for the confusion. Paul's charector seemed a little bit boring to me, I felt like he had no real personality, compared to his druid from ray's session. I felt like everyone really built for their role this time, and it was reflected in the fights. Paul's striker did high consistant damage, Ray's psion had much more control than the druid from the previous game, I had a lot of heals (Looking back, i may have gone a little overboard on that one), and our tank did a decent job for being a hybrid. **As far as Landon's ability to play the Swordwizard more than Assassin is concerned, I think it has more to do with the fact that he actually looked at the characters a little before this session. Also because I was playing (and had less to do during this session) I was able to and did give him some pointers on how the Swordwizard worked. THOSE are what I think the issues that were solved were. And this Assassin came from Dragon Magazine, not an "Essentials" book.RK * BD2 **I really like this system for giving out loot more than the one Ray used. The 85000 GP felt like the perfect amount of gold to equip ourselves with, and we weren't as restricted in out choices. We had the option to buy one massive item if we wanted to, or go for a more balanced route and get some of everything. * BD3 **I liked how we knew excatly where the action was going to be, we were handed a mission and told how to get where we needed to be. A good move for a miny. That said, Union felt a little bit empty, like there was nothing going on there. I think you had planned for us to go to the dungeon and not do much else, which is fine, but compared to Mosstone, Union just didn't feel as alive. It might be because of my history with Mosstone. Mosstone felt more like a living city, with people moving around and a lot of things going on. Im not sure why i felt this way. other comments?? **I don't know how it felt in my mini from the player perspective, but I know that I had a lot of ideas for what was going on in Mosstone, which I HOPE came across in the session. As I've expressed before I wanted to play up the investigation part of that session. If Ryan had planned for us to mostly go on to the dungeon then that can explain why Union seemed lackluster. I'm sure in a proper campaign he would have planned for more contingencies (as would have I, in my session)RK. * BD4 ** I liked the dungeon a lot, My favorite part of the mini by far. Having a map makes our decisions about which hallway to take feel meaningful. The 3D aspect of it was cool also, try to bring as much of that set of building materials as you can to the next session, I have a plan for them. * BD5 **This fight was well coordinated and fun. Congrats on keeping it together in this fight. It felt like an appropriate difficulty for a mid dungeon fight, I was never really threatened but we had to use up some of our bigger powers. The party separating here was a problem(again), not your fault ryan. You could have made the enemy ship smaller, maybe. That way if we boarded it we could clear it out and get back on track in a reasonable amount of time. * BD6 **I didn't like this fight as much for some reason. I know I was bothered that you announced you had changed the defenses of the spellweaver. This sort of meta-game stuff is a real breakdown in game play and should be avoided at all costs. Also, I think fighting one guy is a little boring. I DID like that the succubus was summoned to help out, that was cool, and i expected something to come from the elemental room as well. You may have had that in your plans and scrapped it at the last second. I know you got very tired at the end. I also felt like this fell in to the realm of "High HP and low damage boss man" we just banged on him for a while until he died. I liked the living spells in the room though. The terrain was a bit boring, just like I talked to ray about in his session, but that is something that you have to DM for a while to get interesting. * BD7 **All in all, great job. I really was worried that you would get distracted and kind of zone out, much like you tend to do as a player, but you kept it together nicely! Again, your fights happened in square rooms which is a little boring, try to get some interesting terrain in next time. Its amazing what some razed platforms or some magic nodes will do to a fight. Your overall dungeon design was fantatic though, with the slime blocking some areas and some empty rooms, it felt like a real place and not a "fight through room after room of baddies to get to the end" dungeon. Paul's Comments *too lazy to do the foot notes *Union seemed like a cool place, but I think most of it's potential grandeur was wasted becuase it was so huge, and the players knew that if they didn't finish the session that night it would proabably never be finished. I would have like a little bit more flavor thrown in through some descriptions or NPC comments, but it was still a fun place to start. *The dungeon entrance was cool, set an eerie and bizarre mood. *The dialogue with the succubus was fun. Personally, I would have liked to have messed around a bit more in there for some role play, but again, time constraints did not really permit. *The cafeteria demon was another interesting character, with the same RP problems for time. *The robo pet and the slavers were again more opportunites for some fun RP, but after Raymond's session I was wary of doing much with them unfortunately. I appreciated them being in there nonetheless. *I'm not sure what to say about the slaver fight. Everything leading up to the ship leaving was great. Surprise attack, motivation, and a variety of enemies and attacks came together nicely. We lost our momentum and immersion a bit when we had to have an out of character debate as to how terrible an idea it was to jump on the slave ship. I like the idea that characters should be faced with difficult decisions that test morals against logistics but putting them in the heat of combat didn't work so great for me in this instance, not that I as a DM would have seen it as a potential problem. I felt like you handled the retreat off the ship well though. *The Spellweaver fight had a cool flavor, but I wanted some more desciptions of the monster and his spells. I our vision was impaired, but some glimpses now and then throughout the fight would have been good. I liked the succubus joining the fray, wish she had been more dangerous though. I was also expecting some elementals to come in. I also was a little to aware of the number fudging on this fight. Finally, although not as disastrous as Raymond's, I felt like we hadn't accomplished much by the end. I don't know anything about Spellweavers, but if he could have communicated with us before he left I would have felt much better if he explained himself a bit, or if the robopet had some kind of recording device built in so when we got back to Union we could have learned more about the station since we failed to find whatever clues to the mystery you had planned. *I really appreciate all the time you put into this and had a great time. Thank you.